On the Shores of the Mediterranean (2 page)

We always start at the most distant vineyard, which may be a mile or more away from the house, up or down the hillside, often separated from it by other people’s properties and usually only reached by the roughest and steepest of tracks.

In some of the vineyards the grapes are still trained on
pergole
, trellises, some of them extended out over steep banks which are anything up to eight feet high.
Pergole
are picturesque and shade you from the midday sun, but they no longer accord with modern wine-making theory. No more trellises are being constructed, and new vineyards are planted in regular, widely-spaced parallel rows in fields bulldozed out of the hillside, and the pretty terraced fields one above the other will soon be no more. It is difficult to cut the bunches of grapes under a
pergola
. If they are very high you have to use triangular, home-made step ladders, which everyone keeps for this purpose and for harvesting the olives later in the year, but often, when the ground underneath is too bumpy to set them up, I find myself swinging from the
pergola
, like one of the larger primates trying to reach some far-out bunches.

If it rains it is hell. If it rains heavily you have to stop work, because you get too much water with the grapes when you squash them in the press. A sack is the best thing to wear over the head and shoulders when it rains, cooler and less constricting than a waterproof. If the grapes are more or less a write-off, as they were in 1972, and it rains as well, it is indeed lugubrious, but whatever the conditions, the day passes in constant gossip, which seems to become more and more lubricious as the day goes on; some of the more hair-raising stories being recounted by respectable-looking ladies dressed in the deepest black. From time to time, gusts of laughter sweep through the vineyard as a result of some particularly coarse remark. Some of the time I don’t harvest
the grapes. Instead I am given the job of heaving the
bigonci
, filled with grapes, on to the trailer which will take them back to the press. This is because I am one of the few grown men here who haven’t yet had a hernia from lifting enormous weights.

At about ten o’clock, after we have worked for a couple of hours or more, we have a
merenda
, a picnic, in whichever field we happen to be in, brought there by the farmer’s wife; a very un-English breakfast spread out on a white cloth on the grass, with lots of fresh pecorino, cheese made with ewe’s milk, prosciutto, and what is here called mortadella but which is nothing like real mortadella di Bologna – more like salami – bread baked in the outside wood oven which every house possesses, and wine. We go on having swigs of wine throughout the day, to keep us going, not much but enough, always white.

At about a quarter to one we go back to the house for the midday meal, by which time we have, temporarily at least, had enough. All the morning a band of women have been sorting the bunches that they take from the baskets at tables set up in the various fields, cutting off long stalks, removing leaves which would give the wine a bad taste and rejecting unripe grapes or those covered with mildew, before putting the rest into the
bigonci
. Sometimes, if it is hot, we eat at a long table outside in the yard, but usually we are in the parlour with great black and white photographs of ancestors on the walls. We never drink before the meal, apart from the occasional swig we have already had in the fields, and we never mix white with red, because drinking on an empty stomach and mixing white with red is thought to be injurious to health.

We eat
brodo
, broth, made with beef or chicken stock, with pasta in it, followed by
manzo bollito
, boiled beef, stuffed with a mixture of spinach, egg, parmigiano cheese and mortadella; and also roast or boiled chicken chopped up with a chopper and the
bones broken, the chickens being the best sort that have scratched a living in the yard, roast potatoes, the bitter green salad called
radici
, mixed with home-produced olive oil and vinegar, and plates of delicious tomatoes eaten with oil, salt and pepper.

The afternoon seems longer and harder and, if it is hot, much hotter than the morning, and the work goes on in the fields until it is so dark that it is no longer possible to see anything. It goes on longer back at the house where there is usually a last trailer-load of
bigonci
full of grapes that have to be fed into the
macchina da macinare
, from which they fall into full ones which you hoist on your shoulder before staggering away with them and pouring the contents into one of the
barili
in which it will eventually become wine.

Now, after a good wash at a tap in the yard, we all sit down again, with the children home from school, to eat a dinner: a home-made ravioli (each house has a special piece of furniture called a
madia
, a sort of dough tray, for making pasta), more meat and chicken, but never for some reason pork, then cheese and lots of walnuts, with which we drink the stronger, sweeter wines of which the owner is usually very proud, and coffee.

Then we all reel home under the stars, or through wetting rain, sometimes, if we have indulged too freely, falling into ditches which some thoughtless fellows seem to have dug since we passed that way in the morning; and the next day will be the same, and the next.

This time, we had not come here only to make the wine or simply to drink it while at the same time enjoying the heat of the Mediterranean sun. This time, we were using I Castagni as the point of departure for other, some of them wilder, shores of the Mediterranean. Now it was August. This year, to do our
vendemmia
we would have to return from wherever we happened to be.

What we were hoping to do was to travel around the shores of the Mediterranean, or as many as we felt inclined to travel round (some of them being at that time – as they still are – either difficult or undesirable places to visit unless you have to), with the idea of seeing people, places and things that we had either never seen before or had not seen for so long that we both wanted to see them again and to discover – though we were less anxious about this – what changes time had wrought in them.

‘Shores’ were something we were going to interpret liberally. I knew, from visiting our own neighbouring shores in the Gulf of Spezia and almost the entire Tuscan littoral south of it as far as Livorno, that if I slavishly traversed the entire coastline of the Mediterranean I would end up either as a topographical bore or as one of those prophets of doom and pollution who is actually confronted with what he has been prophesying, rather as Smollett was when he travelled to Rome by way of the Riviera in the eighteenth century. For what has happened to enormous tracts of the Mediterranean was, as we later found out if we did not know it already, too awful for anyone but the most insensitive traveller to contemplate. All the coasts of the Mediterranean, from the east coast of Spain in the latitude of the Balearic Islands to Albania, including the coasts of France, Italy and Yugoslavia, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and the Balearics, are so badly polluted that swimming and eating fish caught in these waters is said to be dangerous, and the same applies in the eastern Mediterranean from northern Syria to the borders of Egypt and Libya.

‘Shores’ were something we interpreted to include places that might be far inland – such as Fez in Morocco where I had long wanted to go, or the edge of the Sahara – providing that they were part of the Mediterranean world. History was something I proposed not to delve into too deeply, even though in order to pay for this land-borne Odyssey I was going to write a book about
it. The thought of attempting to chronicle in more or less detail the peoples who had dwelt on its shores, sometimes merely as a passing whim, made my mind reel: Minoans, Egyptians, Greeks, Macedonians, Israelites, Phoenicians, Romans, Dacians, Etruscans, Carthaginians, Persians, Arabs, Assyrians, Albanians, Jews, Vikings, Crusaders of various nationalities, Byzantines, Vandals, Genoese, Turks, Venetians, Dutch, English, French, Spaniards, Slovenes and Croats and Montenegrins, Barbary pirates of various sorts and goodness knows who else, like a cast of billions in some colossal, crazy Cecil B. de Mille film of the thirties. It was no wonder that many of the writers of books about the Mediterranean, of whom there are lots, had failed to keep such a mob under control. I had no intention of trying.

‘Where were you thinking of starting?’ Wanda asked me one cold morning in deepest Dorset when the idea of the Mediterranean had finally taken shape.

‘I was thinking of Gibraltar,’ I said. ‘There’s a nice view from the top and I could start the book at the end, with the collapse of the British Empire, like they do in films. The Americans should like that, the bit about the collapse. Or I could start in Egypt, on top of the Great Pyramid. The only thing is you can’t see the Mediterranean from the top of it.’

‘I thought you said you wanted to go back to Naples,’ she said.

‘I do, at some stage,’ I said.

‘Well why don’t you start in Naples and go clockwise round the Mediterranean instead of dashing off in all directions like a lunatic?’ she asked.

So we did.

The train trundled into Naples through the happy hunting grounds of the Camorra in the suburbs of Grumo, Frattamaggiore and Casoria, past the Cimitero Monumentale up on the hill at Poggioreale and the Cimitero Nuovo, past a forgotten section of the city called the Rione Luzzatti, past the Mercato Agricola and the Prison, the Carcere Giudiziario, and past the Pasconello marshalling yards in which long lines of carriages stood shimmering in the sun like so many red-hot ingots. It was so hot that I wondered if the place might literally explode.

‘There are no hotels in Pozzuoli,’ a
sollecitatore
, a tout for one of the hotels, said as, carrying our luggage, we entered the foyer of the Stazione Centrale, which although built almost entirely of
stainless steel and plate glass was, after the train in which we had been immured for about eight hours, a haven of coolness if not of quiet. We wanted to stay in Pozzuoli, outside the city to the west, partly because we knew it would be quieter than Naples and partly because it is on the shores of the fascinating region known as the Campi Flegrei, the Phlegraean Fields.

‘Non fare lo stupido!’
Wanda said. The very rude equivalent in Italian of ‘Don’t be bloody daft!’ ‘There were dozens of hotels and pensions when we last stayed there.’

‘Well, there aren’t any now,’ he said. ‘They’re all kaput. There are
terremoti
, earthquakes.’

‘Of course there are hotels and
pensioni
at Pozzuoli,’ the man at the official Tourist Information desk in the station said when we appealed to him. ‘This man is lying –
va via!’
he said to the
sollecitatore
, and when he had gone off, grumbling to himself, ‘There are altogether nineteen hotels and
pensioni
at Pozzuoli; but unfortunately they are all full.’

We asked him how he knew they were all full.

‘Because other visitors who arrived earlier today have also asked to stay in Pozzuoli and I have telephoned every one of them. All are full.’

And with that, because we were hot and done in, we allowed him to consign us, telling us how much we would enjoy staying in it, to a
pensione
in Mergellina that might have won a prize, if the owner had wanted to enter for it, for the noisiest and worst
pensione
in its class anywhere on the Italian shores of the Mediterranean.

He, too, the man at the information desk, was lying. In fact all the hotels and
pensioni
in Pozzuoli were completely empty, which was not surprising considering that the town was being shaken by up to sixty earthquake shocks a day of an intensity between three and four on the Mercalli scale.

‘The only thing the hotels at Pozzuoli are full of is
paura
[fear],’ said an elderly gentleman who we found sitting on a bench at the railway station at Pozzuoli watching the trains go by, when we went there a few days later.

‘And what are you doing here, then,’ Wanda asked him, ‘if it’s so dangerous?’

‘Io?’
he said.
‘Io sono di Baia. Vengo ogni giorno in treno. Sono in pensione. Mi piace un po’ di stimolo.’
(‘Me? I’m from Baia. I come in here every day on the train. I’m an old-age pensioner. I like a bit of excitement.’)

Loaded with inaccurate information we went out through the swing doors of the station into Piazza Garibaldi which was filled with orange-coloured buses, where yet more of the local inhabitants were waiting to practise their skills on us: vendors of hard and soft drugs, contraband cigarettes and lighters, souvenirs, imitation coral necklaces; male prostitutes; juvenile and not so juvenile pimps, pickpockets and bag-snatchers, as well as large numbers of inoffensive, if not positively kindly Napoletani. In fact it was just like any other open space outside a main station anywhere.

Somewhere near the middle of the Piazza someone, presumably someone unused to Naples, had tethered a motorcycle to a lamp standard with the equivalent of a small anchor chain that would have been difficult to cut even with bolt cutters, threading it through and round the front wheel instead of through the frame, a serious error. Now, all that remained of the motorcycle was the front wheel, still chained to the lamp standard.

It was obvious that whatever had happened elsewhere in the Mediterranean in the twenty years since we had last visited it, basically Naples was one of the places that had not changed.

Six nights later we were sitting at a table in the open air in Piazza Sannazzaro, at the west end of Naples, midway between the Mergellina railway station and Porto Sannazzaro where yachts,
fishing boats and the big, grey, fast patrol boats of the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian equivalent of the British and American customs, lie moored practically alongside the fast, perhaps faster, smaller boats used by the smugglers, the Contrabbandieri.

One of the entrances to this Piazza is by way of a long, fume-filled tunnel, the Galleria della Laziale, which runs down into it under Monte Posillipo from what was, until recently, the village of Fuorigrotta (Outside the Grotto), now a huge, modern suburb out towards the Phlegraean Fields to the west.

At the point where this tunnel enters the Piazza there is a set of traffic lights which are set in such a fashion that they only operate in favour of pedestrians at intervals of anything up to five minutes, and then only for something like thirty seconds, before the drivers of vehicles once again get the green, which in Naples is interpreted as a licence to kill.

But because this is Naples, when the light turns green it is still not safe for pedestrians to cross here (or anywhere else in the city for that matter), even with the lights in their favour, as motorcyclists and drivers of motor vehicles still continue to roar into the Piazza whatever colour the lights are.

This is because for Neapolitan drivers the red light has a unique significance. Here, in Naples, it is regarded as a suggestion that perhaps they might consider stopping. If however they do stop, then it is practically certain that those behind will not have considered the possibility of them doing so and there will be a multiple collision, with everybody running into the vehicle in front. Because of this possibility it is equally dangerous for Neapolitans, whether drivers or pedestrians, to proceed when the green light announces that they can do so.

At this particular set of lights there is yet another danger for pedestrians waiting on the pavement. When the lights are against the traffic emerging from the tunnel, any motorcyclist worth his
salt mounts the pavement and drives through the ranks of those pedestrians who are still poised on it trying to make up their minds whether or not it is safe to step into the road and cross.

And what about the orange light? It is a reasonable question to ask.

‘And what about the orange light?’ Luccano de Crescenza, a Neapolitan photographer and writer, the author of a very amusing book on the habits of his fellow citizens,
La Napoli di Bellavista
, once asked an elderly inhabitant who passed the time of day at various traffic lights, presumably waiting for accidents to occur. To which he replied,
‘l’Arancio? Quello non dice niente. Lo teniamo per allegria.’
(‘The Orange? That doesn’t mean anything. We keep it to brighten the place up.’)

This tunnel, and another which also runs under Monte Posillipo, more or less parallel to it, the Galleria Quattro Giornate, replace the tunnel, a wonder of ancient engineering more than 2200 feet long, 20 feet wide and in some places 70 feet high, that linked Roman Napolis with the Phlegraean Fields.

Above the eastern portal of this tunnel, now closed, which emerged at Piedigrotta (Foot of the Grotto) next door to the Mergellina railway station, there is what is said to be a Roman columbarium, a dovecote. It stands on what is supposed to be the site of the tomb of Virgil, who was buried on Monte Posillipo after his death in Brundusium, the modern Brindisi, on his way back from Greece, in September, 19 BC and which was visited by John Evelyn on his way to the Phlegraean Fields in 1645.

Previously Virgil had lived in a villa on the hill where he composed the
Georgics
and the
Aeneid
but was so dissatisfied with the
Aeneid
, which he had written for the glorification of Rome, that he gave orders that after his death it should be destroyed, a fate which, mercifully for posterity, was avoided by the intervention of the Emperor Augustus, who forbade it.

Although it was by now after eleven o’clock in the evening and a weekday, it was August, holiday time, and the tables in Piazza Sannazzaro were as crowded as they had been two or three hours previously. In fact the tables were so closely packed together that the only way in which it was possible to be sure which establishment one was patronizing was by the different colours of the tablecloths.

These were very cheap places in which to eat, that is to say you could have a meal, the principal plate of which might be risotto or spaghetti
con vongole
, clams, which we hoped had been dredged from some part of the Mediterranean that was not rich in mercury and other by-products of industry, and almost unlimited wine (at least two litres) at a cost of about 12,000 lire for two. (At this time, August 1983, the exchange was around L2395 for £1, L1605 for $1.) Here, you could eat an entire meal, which few of the sort of Napoletani who brought what appeared to be their entire families with them could afford to do, or a single dish. Or you could eat nothing at all and simply drink Nastro Azzurro, the local beer which, strangely enough, is better in bottles than on draught when it is usually too gassy, or wine, or Coca Cola. Here, in the Piazza, beer drinkers outnumbered wine drinkers.

One of the sources of drink in Piazza Sannazzaro was a dark little hole in the wall with
VINI
inscribed over it on a stone slab, from which this and the various other beverages were dispensed by a rather grumpy-looking old woman in the black weeds of age or widowhood or both, who spoke nothing but the Neapolitan dialect. This dispensary formed in part an eating place called the Antica Pizzeria da Pasqualino which offered four different varieties –
gusti specialità
– of pizza:
polpo
(with octopus)
al sugo, capricciosa, frutta di mare
and
capponato
, presumably filled with capon. These pizzas are good. They make anything bought outside Italy, and some pizzas made in Italy and even in Naples by those who
are not interested in making them properly – a bit of underbaked dough smeared with
salsa di pomodoro
, tomato sauce, and adorned with a few olives and fragments of anchovy – seem like an old tobacco pouch with these items inside it. The sort of pizza that the English traveller Augustus Hare was offered when in Naples in 1883, the one he described as ‘a horrible condiment made of dough baked with garlic, rancid bacon and strong cheese … esteemed a feast’.

What he should have been eating is something of which the foundation is a round of light, leavened dough which has been endlessly and expertly kneaded, on to which have been spread, in its simplest form, olive oil, the cheese called mozzarella, anchovies, marjoram and
salsa di pomodoro
, and baked in a wood-fuelled oven.

Amongst all the Napoletani there were very few foreigners to be seen. This was because there is relatively little accommodation in Mergellina – a couple of small hotels and three
pensioni
– and very few visitors to Naples, once they find out what can happen to them in the city, unless they are young and active and travelling together in a band, are at night prepared to go far from the area where they are actually sleeping.

Our evening in Piazza Sannazzaro had been almost too full of incident. Just after nine o’clock, a boy had ridden up on a Vespa and stopped outside the Trattoria Agostino, a place very similar to the one we were in and about fifty yards away on the corner of Via Mergellina, at its junction with the Salita Piedigrotta. There, at point-blank range, without dismounting, he had fired five shots in rapid succession, from what sounded to me more like a peashooter than a pistol, at a man sitting at a table outside the establishment, apparently trying to
gambizzare
, blow his kneecaps off, all of which missed, except one which grazed his bottom.

The man at the table was Mario dello Russo, aged thirty-four.
He had a criminal record as a member of the Camorra, a fully fledged member of the Nuova Famiglia, the principal rivals of the now-ascendant Nuova Camorra Organizzata (NCO) with whom they were currently engaged in a fight to the death, or until some other satisfactory arrangement could be arrived at.

This battle, which was taking place under our eyes, was for the ultimate control of almost everything criminal: robbery, kidnapping, intimidation of shopkeepers, all sorts of smuggling including drugs, male and female prostitution and illegal property development not only in Naples and the offshore islands of Ischia and Capri but in the whole of Italy from Apulia and Calabria in the deep south as far north as Milan.

After five minutes, three cars loaded with members of the Squadra Mobile arrived, together with an ambulance, and dello Russo was carted off. The boy who actually fired the shots was, in fact, a person of no consequence, what is known in the Camorra, an organization with unchanging, traditional ways of doing things, rather like Pop at Eton, as a Picciotto di Onore, a Lad of Honour, an unpaid apprentice to the Camorra, anxious to prove his worth and loyalty to the cause. The next step up the ladder was to become what used to be called a Picciotto di Sgarroe. This needed a far greater degree of self-sacrifice and abnegation, the postulant often being required to take the responsibility for crimes committed by fully fledged Camorristi and to accept whatever sentence was meted out to him by law, even if it meant spending years in prison.